shorbaji

I wonder what fraction of the hardware goes into hosting the human operator and into ensuring their safety. How much hardware cam be optimized away when there is no longer a human operator?

At first, yes. Longer term, self-driving construction vehicles will likely change the entire market - perhaps similar to how self-driving passenger cars would change that market. Vehicles will be designed differently and consumption-based business models would potentially make up a larger part of the market. Investors are probably see that opportunity.

With the construction equipment market at $160B, this certainly is quite a sizable niche. Specializing in it is clever.

And an $80M round sounds sane these days

If you use WebSockets for "realtime push", then HTTP/2's server push feature could potentially be used as an alternative.

One thing to keep in mind with HTTP/2 server push is that a server can only send a push in response to a client request. So this isn't a drop-in "real-time push" mechanism. To implement the equivalent of real-time push would likely require client/server to keep a stream within the connection in the "open" state whereby the server can send continue to send data frames on that.

Yep. Livesheets more or less.

It certainly is a good idea.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I've been toying with the idea of having users use a data flow diagram to structure complex spreadsheets. Still have a pre-prototype stage and I'ld love to get your expert feedback on that idea. If interested please drop me a note.

Interesting. As I understand it, you use a spreadsheet as input and then create the data flow diagram. I certainly see how seeing the data flow diagram means better clarity and error-finding. So here is a question for you? What if we take it a step further and have users actually entered their complex spreadsheets in a tidy graphical data flow diagram which mapped back?

Thanks PG. Please do.

True. As a broker of sorts, it is essential that AirBnB withhold details of the two parties. But the company need not hide that they do so. The certainly would not be ashamed if news broke out that they do so.

The transparency I speak about is slightly different. AirBnB where (I think) caught out when news broke of a landlord's home was vandalized. The company was heavily criticized for an arguably insufficiently transparent initial response.

Eventually, AirBnB were transparent in the sense that they acknowledged mistakes and acknowledged inherent risks to landlords. They used that transparency to improve the offering and promote the product accordingly. Kudos to Chesky and team!

At the risk of repeating myself, I see a parallel with Heroku's status dashboard. In a sense they are saying: "We won't mislead you. Hosting with us carries risk of downtime. Here is a dashboard so you see how well (or bad) we are doing." That too is an example of transparency leading to an improved service offering.

Heroku seem to have done it proactively. AirBnB did so reactively. Better late, of course, than never.

The debate of more vs. less transparency is not trivial. Regulatory and competitive considerations make this difficult. Sometimes it is simply human nature to be secretive - particularly when it comes to bad news.

The article focuses on transparency between management and employees. Transparency with customers and with the public is at least equally interesting.

A company can benefit from transparency. Heroku, for example, are transparent with their downtime (e.g. status.heroku.com). Another example is the case of AirBnB and the EJ debacle. Once AirBnB openly acknowledged that safety/security is a concern for landlords it adapted by rolling out an improved product (guarantees, safety features, etc).

Both of these are great examples of transparency at the core impacting the product and how it is marketed. These products are more valuable and more competitive because of transparency. Certainly this adds to revenues and likely the bottom line as well.

AirBnB could have adopted this approach earlier. So, the lack of transparency can be missed opportunity.

I am not involved with Stypi but I think the key points from the article are "it wants to let native applications like Photoshop sync changes between multiple users" and that "they’ve laid the groundwork to let other applications sync".

In other words a text editor is one instance of an application that can use the underlying service. Think about that for a second. The concept of collaborative editing as a service that can be adapted to ANY application is HUGE. For example, an engineering CAD app would be more powerful with this feature.

Going further,if you consider that machines can also "collaborate" then it get's even more interesting. An example of human/machine collaboration could be a real-time reporting application.

Congrats on the launch Stypi team. Just curious about the underlying tech. Are you using operational transformation (OT) like google docs does OR are you using an alternative such as causal trees (CT)?

SEEKING WORK, Dubai, remote. Developer. C/Python/Django. Contact: omar.shorbaji@gmail.com

Reminds me of Paul Graham's observation:

"Twitter is important because it's a new protocol. Fundamentally it's a messaging protocol where you don't specify the recipients. It's really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely."

http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

For compatibility in general, http://roaringapps.com/ looks like a decent guide.

Not sure about Oracle 10g though.

Is it just me or do these ads look fairly similar to the landing pages of your typical web app?

There isn't much room for half-commitment while on a video call and the interpersonal aspects of the job come to the front. This changes the way one works.

But it isn't quite that novel. Face-to-face interaction we have in the real world can be viewed as high-quality "video communications". Technology is merely making it affordable to do the same at a distance and without losing much of the quality.

So, most of the old etiquette simply migrates to the new medium. For example, if you don't go to work in pyjamas you probably won't take a video call at home while in your pyjamas either.

Interesting work that looks promising.

In general though, is it just me or are we yet to see an API/library/protocol that makes it 'simple' to add real time capabilities to an app?

Bruce Schneier's blog could be an interesting read.

He talks about social engineering as a form of security attack but much of the examples he may provide are relevant.

http://www.google.com/search?domains=www.schneier.com&si...

Do you think the fact that you proposed a cloud hosting platform was part of the reason for rejection?

By the way, the landing page design looks great!

If you have these components in separate folders within the main project folder simple create a git repo within each folder.

  $cd engine
  $git init .
  $cd ../web-files
  $git init .

A Cisco whitepaper is http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk59/technologies_white_pape...

This was posted earlier on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986867?

Nice!

How about a script for a *NIX command line?

  $ tidypub -t 'Any Title' < foo.txt
  http://www.tidypub.org/wHzf3
  $

I work for TANDBERG (now a part of Cisco) and I've dropped a note to Lars, the "inventor" in the patent. I certainly would like to hear the other side of the story and will share it if I get it.

Congratualtions. Look forward to reading the tech posts.

Have you evaluated causal trees against OT as the collaboration algorithm?

See:

bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/ctre.pdf bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/broth5.pdf

Good luck with this. There certainly is room for something light & inspiring.

I would like to see a tool that would, first, allow real-time editing of structured documents. Think Etherpad meets Wufoo.

Take the example of a team writing an RFP to buy IT equipment. Team members from purchasing, the business unit and IT would need to collaborate on a document with likely a pre-defined structure (technical specs, functional specs, terms & conditions, deadlines, etc). This is different from the lack of structure in Google Wave or Etherpad. I imagine that the majority of knowledge work in today's enterprise is about filling in templates rather than free-flowing text.

For this to work, as a minimum we would need:-

1. real-time communication 2. the ability to design templates with the right balance between strictness & flexibility

Second, it should support a workflow. Sticking with this example, the purchasing manager should be able to publish the RFP and invite vendors to respond. The bid manager at the vendors should then be able to turn (transform) an RFP into a bid template, invite his/her sales team to collaborate on a bid and so on.

Not sure how this would work, but perhaps the following:-

1. Access control 2. A way to transforming one document with a certain structure to another.

Hi Armando, I like your work and if you are looking to do some freelance UI design work please drop me a note. I am interested in working with you.

Interesting.

I would imagine the right to pressing button or having your button pressed will be institutionalized,e.g. through a Church or Government. Doing that freely and often - before some sort of permission, license or ceremony - would be stigmatized and possibly outlawed.

0.2% for food & beverages! Looks like plenty of room there for startups, e.g. OpenTable-like service but for meal takeaways and orders (as opposed to OpenTable's eating out)

vanelsas